Recent university grads pessimistic about job market

Whether they’re broke and out of work or just scraping by, young voters just don’t know which presidential candidate will help them out more in putting their college educations to use.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the unemployment rate for college graduates between the ages of 20 and 24 went from 6.5 percent in June 2008 to 12 percent last year and stood at 9.9 percent this June. Meanwhile, the not-for-profit Project on Student Debt put the average student loan debt for people graduating with their B.A.s in 2010 at $25,250. A report done for The Associated Press in April showed that 53 percent of recent college graduates are either un- or underemployed.

{mosads}Cornell University President David Skorton claims that uncertainty about the future is what’s keeping the recession going. Though Cornell graduates’ employment rates have been “robust during the recession,” he says, “people are uncertain about which party’s going to be in charge come November … and it’s a little more pronounced than it was.”

Florida State University, Cornell, Drexel and departments at the University of Michigan have all seen increases in applications to their graduate programs. What’s not clear is if the struggling economy has played a role in the increased enrollment.

Financially, these young, unemployed or underemployed voters sit between a rock and a hard place, increasing the importance of the presidential election to them. 

That’s certainly the case for 22-year-old Tyler Kubik, a Buffalo, N.Y., native who graduated from SUNY Buffalo in 2011 with a degree in business administration and a concentration in finance. The jobs Kubik’s B.A. qualify him for mostly involve selling insurance, he says.

The wages, though, are usually 100 percent based on commissions. Besides that, Kubik doesn’t even want to work in sales. Ideally, he’d prefer risk analysis.

Instead, he took a job as a banquet server after graduation. He lives at home with his parents and younger brother, a sophomore in college. 

“If the two mainstream candidates go by what they say,” Kubik said, “they have zero chance to improve the economy. Same candidate, different rhetoric to appeal to different bases.” In November, he’s likely either to vote for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, or write in Ron Paul. 

Nick Sibilla, another underemployed recent graduate, also doubts that electing one of the mainstream presidential candidates will improve the situation.

Sibilla, who is from the District of Columbia, has worked five internships since graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011 and just landed a fellowship for the fall. He voted for Obama in 2008, but this year he hopes both Romney and Obama lose the election and is likely to throw his support behind the Libertarian candidate as well.

Sibilla is among the two-thirds of college graduates who finished with at least some student loan debt — in his case, $18,000 from his time at Pittsburgh. He intended to have a full-time job by June of last year, which would’ve helped with payments and maybe gotten him out of his parents’ house in Northern Virginia, where he now lives.

Still, according to Neal McCluskey, a higher-education analyst at Cato Institute, the student loan burden isn’t quite as bad as some would make it out to be. While the job market is tougher than it was several years ago, he says, “There is no evidence that I’m aware of that, broadly, [that] recent graduates are being crushed by their debt.”

Two recent graduates whom The Hill interviewed had no debt at all. Derek Rowan, from Brownsville, Texas, went to college right out of high school and didn’t finish his degree until he was 27, but he still has no debt. This, he says, is the result of having received scholarships, saving early on and working during summers while in school.

Rowan graduated from the University of Texas-Pan American in December with a degree in mechanical engineering. He looked for work throughout college. Still, six months passed after graduation before he found a job for which he qualified.

Another recent graduate, Natalie Simpson, chose to take the summer off after graduating from Bryn Mawr College this past May. She’s been working at a California Pizza Kitchen in Seattle and living with her parents. If she did have debt, she would be working two jobs, she said.

While most of the graduates interviewed said they don’t trust Mitt Romney, none of them except Simpson were certain they’d support Obama, either. Johnathan Alvarez got his nursing degree in late 2011 and has been looking for work in Texas since May. He voted for Obama in 2008 based on the healthcare law, but has since decided the legislation adds up to unconstitutional taxation.

Rowan isn’t sure for whom to vote in the fall, but Simpson says she’ll “definitely” vote for Obama “because I trust him more than Mitt Romney. Between the two of them, Obama still has the better intentions.” That’s not exactly a resounding endorsement, but while she admits Obama has let her down on some agenda items, she says, “I trust him” to follow through on his promises “when it is possible.”